


Opening Doors

by bookishandbossy



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: A little angst, F/M, Superpowers, all the marvel characters!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-05
Updated: 2014-09-05
Packaged: 2018-02-16 06:22:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2259261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookishandbossy/pseuds/bookishandbossy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Skye couldn't control her powers, and when she could.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Opening Doors

**Author's Note:**

> This takes place in the same universe/timeline as Lost and Found. I just couldn't resist the idea of writing a Skye superpower training fic!

The first time that it happens, it is simple. Skye and Trip are sprinting down a tunnel, trying to catch up to the only HYDRA agent left in the bunker. They are fast but the agent is faster and Trip is telling her that maybe they need to call in backup and all she can think is that she won't be able to forgive herself if this one gets away. And then an entire chunk of the ceiling, wires and rocks and pipes, comes crashing down and traps the HYDRA agent. After, when they've tranquilized and handcuffed the agent, Trip stares at the wall puzzled. “It's like someone ripped it out with their bare hands.” he says.

“There probably was a crack somewhere. Lucky for us.” she replies. But really she's trembling inside and she's thinking I did that.

The second time that it happens, it is not. It is at the end of another long, hard day, another day of tracking down HYDRA bases and finding them empty, and she is tired and angry in a way that goes deep down to her bones. When she stalks inside her bunk and throws herself down on her bed, she hears something crash and looks up to see her clock and her lamp throwing themselves against the wall until they shatter completely. Then her pillows thump up and down and her nightstand slides from wall to wall. It takes her longer than it should to make them stop moving and she shakes as she wraps herself in her quilt afterward. Trip comes to check on her, bearing a mug of cocoa, and she almost asks him to stay.

The third time is something new. This time nothing breaks and this time is much, much worse. She goes to see Coulson in his office at the base, to tell him that she thinks she can move things with her mind and she doesn't know what's happening to her, but when she stands before his desk, she hears something, a frantic, fast-paced string of worry. Skye's looking tired and Simmons looks worse and Trip's injuries still aren't healed. We have to go, we have to keep up, we have to find more of our people. I have to lead, I have to smile, I have to pretend that everything is going according to plan. I wonder how Melinda does it. “Did you say something?” she blurts out and he looks up, surprised to see her there.

“No, sorry. Did Simmons send you up on a supply mission?” he asks. “Ask her how much she's willing to pay on the black market for that new centrifuge she wants.”

“She's fine for now. I was just checking in.” she says and flees. She stumbles into the living room, where Trip glances up at her and lets his eyes stay there.

“Hey,” he says softly. “Are you okay? Ferris Bueller's Day Off is on, if you want to watch with me.” They both love John Hughes movies—she'd even talked him into sneaking off base on one of their slow weeks to watch a Hughes marathon and she's pretty sure he'd cried at the end of The Breakfast Club. 

“I'm fine.” she tries to smile at him and then she's hearing the voices again. Only now it sounds like Trip. On the surface, his mind is open and relaxed but there's a thread of tension running underneath—the aching pain in his side, the undercover operation they're scheduled for next week—and underneath that...there's her. Her by his side on a mission, her making terrible puns on the couch, her smile, her eyes, her mouth, her curled up beside him in his bunk. And now Skye is blushing, a terrible deep shade of red, and she leaves before she can say something that she'll regret.

Jemma, she thinks. Jemma will know precisely what to do, because she's a genius and she's Jemma. She takes the stairs to the lab two at a time and she bursts in through the glass doors, not noticing that they open without her having to touch them. “Jemma,” Skye tells her, “Jemma, either I'm going crazy or I'm hearing people's thoughts.” Jemma nearly drops the sample dish that she's holding and then her eyes go wide with what Skye calls the mad scientist look.

“What makes you think that they're people's thoughts?” Jemma asks calmly, trying to restrain her excitement. “It could be your subconscious projecting your worries onto them.”

“It sounds like their voices. And I heard Trip's thoughts and they...” Now she's blushing again. She used to be proud of the fact that she never blushed.

“Interesting.” Jemma's voice is crisp and clear, and Skye is pretty sure that Jemma is pretending like it's nothing for her sake. If Fitz were still here, Jemma would be squealing and analyzing and asking a million questions and spouting out the kind of fast-paced scientific jargon that no one on the team understands anymore. And Skye wouldn't be freaking out because Fitzsimmons would have it under control. But Fitz is gone and Jemma is still finding her way without him, so she is retreating into her best scientist self. “We need to test this. I'll think of something very specific and then you'll tell me what I'm thinking. Ready?” Skye nods—she doesn't want to tell Jemma that she's been hearing her thoughts since she came into the lab and she doesn't know how to make it stop.

“Hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron, carbon, nitrogen—You're reciting the periodic table. But underneath that you're trying to figure out what's wrong with the scent-tracking drones and you're thinking that you need to try a few different ratios of the compounds. There's a lot of science stuff that I don't understand. Something about the centrifuge you want to buy and the new schedule for Coulson's injections to balance out the GH35. And underneath all of that, there's Fitz. He's...he's always there.” Skye stopped talking too late, when she saw the way that the blood drained out of Jemma's face. “I'm sorry. I didn't know that...that there was so much in your head.” Really, she did. She knew, somehow, that Jemma's mind would be the worst of all.

“I think you should stop now.” Jemma is pale and has a tight grip on the edge of her lab bench, keeping herself upright.

“I don't know how.” Skye admits. “Help me?” For a moment, they stand there in silence, the scientist and her subject, the normal and the warped, and the few feet between them seem immeasurably vast. Then Jemma is moving to hug her tight, and telling her that of course she's going to help, and for the first time since that ceiling crashed down, Skye thinks that things might be okay and that the world is a much friendlier place with a best friend.

She's lost count of how many times it's happened by the time she's able to stop it. May has taught the rest of the team shielding techniques which work more often than not, because of course Melinda May knows techniques to protect herself from psychics, and she's been working with Skye on exercises to improve her control. May has a three-hour-long workout for her every morning, complete with tai-chi that she claims will help Skye stay inside her own head, and after a month or two, Skye is beginning to remember what it feels like to be alone inside her head, even if sometimes she has to be alone to do it. One morning May turns to her and says “I want you to read me.”

“What?” Skye stops in the middle of her sit-ups.

“I'll let my shields down, you'll read me, and then you'll stop. Easy as that. And keep doing the sit-ups.” May orders. So Skye tries her best, and for a minute or two she reads May's mind, which is a coil of tightly focused energy, like a calm river that flows into a crashing waterfall. For a minute or two, she stops reading May's mind. Then she loses control and she's reading May's mind again and May snaps her shields back up so all Skye gets are the edges of thoughts. She's getting more powerful, Skye realizes suddenly, because before she wouldn't have gotten anything at all. “Not bad.” May finally says. “I'm going to call a friend. I think you need training from someone with similar talents.”

A week later, she is on a small plane, after signing all kinds of non-disclosure agreements and listening to five separate lectures from Coulson on how she can never ever tell anyone about this, and it feels strange to be without her team. May told her to keep up her exercises, Coulson made her promise to call every Sunday, Jemma hugged her tightest, and Trip hugged her longest. The windows are blacked out so she can't see where she's going and when they finally land, they have her keep her eyes shut for the walk from the landing strip. When she opens them, she's in front of a castle and a man with the most impressive muscles she's ever seen is offering to carry her luggage. For a moment, she wonders idly if she's stumbled into one of her favorite daydreams. Then she sees a guy burst into flame in the garden and she realizes that she's stumbled into something far beyond her daydreams. “What is this place?” she asks the man carrying her bags.

“It's a school for those with unique powers.” he says carefully. “I'm one of the teachers here. Logan.” He sticks out a hand to her, effortlessly shifting her two heavy suitcases to one hand, hanging one off what she thinks might be a claw.

“Skye. Are you my teacher?” She takes his hand and shakes it, warily eying the skin above his knuckles where the claws seem to come from.

“I'm just the welcoming committee. Someone decided that I had people skills.” he grumbles. “No, Jean'll be your teacher. That's her coming down the hill.” A gorgeous redheaded woman is running down the hill, balancing a stack of papers, and Skye notices that Logan's face shifts into something completely different, his mouth curving up into a wide smile and his eyes lighting up. The woman is blushing faintly when she sees him and Skye expects Logan to kiss her as soon as she gets to them. But instead she nods at Logan and says a polite hello, introducing herself to Skye as Jean Grey and telling Logan where to put Skye's luggage, and then they're heading off towards the castle. 

“How is Melinda?” Jean asks after a while. “I hadn't heard from her in years, until she asked me if I'd take on a student.”

“She's all right. Working to put SHIELD back together, after the war. It's been a hard two years but...she's Melinda May.” 

“We wanted to help, you know. Discreetly. The Professor sent supplies, some of our less noticeable agents—did you ever meet Bishop?” Jean smiles at Skye's nod. “We cleared out some of the HYDRA bases when we could, but I always worry that we didn't do enough. We've been in hiding for a very long time and the world never seems to be quite ready for us.”

“The world seems to be doing fine with the Avengers. More than fine—my boss let me read Captain America's fan mail once. What makes you different?”

“We were born with our powers, not made. They can be quite strange, we can't always control them...” Jean shrugs, trailing off. “There was a time in the seventies when the outside world was briefly aware of us and we thought things might be different. But people have short memories and so now control is more important than ever. Which is why Melinda sent you here.” she adds hastily. Jean knows how important control over this kind of power is, even if she doesn't know how she knows it.

“So you think that I'm like all of you?” If she is, she'll probably start sprouting feathers any day now, Skye thinks. May's going to send her off to train with the Falcon and see if she could fly.

“Your powers are very similar to mine but the Professor's fairly sure that they're of a different origin. There's been a few similar cases—you haven't heard of anyone named Star-Lord, have you?”

“Not outside a video game.” Skye's pretty sure that Jean's teasing her now and she rolls her eyes up at the sky. “So how are we going to start?”

“You meditated with Melinda, didn't you?” Jean asks and Skye lets out a huge sigh.

They meditate together for the next week, sitting in the garden, in the classrooms, in Jean's office. They meditate together in the middle of a late summer rain storm and at noon under a hot summer sun, late at night when it's absolutely quiet and in the middle of passing period when students pound their way through the hallways, in every situation that Jean can come up with. She has to always be in control, Jean tells her, she has to remember that she controls her abilities, not the other way around. That a Skye who can read minds is still Skye.

Finally, after Skye can slip into a state so grounded that even Logan stabbing and healing himself in less than a minute doesn't faze her, they move on to telekinesis. Jean tells Skye that the Professor had her work on telekinesis first, when her telepathy was too overwhelming, and that she'll do the same with Skye. They start with small objects—pens, stones, light silk scarves—until Skye can control their motion while running around the school grounds, then they move on to shoes and books and chairs and eventually walls. She makes a small building on the school's grounds come crashing down and then builds it up again. And she wonders sometimes if she is becoming the kind of person that SHIELD keeps a file on, or if she already was.

It's only after weeks and weeks have passed (she thinks, she's not sure if time works differently here) that they start with the mind reading again. Before, Skye spent most of her time with Jean, who has some of the best mental shields she's ever seen but now Jean brings in other people every day for Skye to practice on. There are exercises and drills and tips and tricks. Always keep up your breathing pattern. Think of their minds as a door that you have the key to. Now open it. Now lock it. Keep it locked and tuck it away in a corner of your mind. It should be as natural as breathing. Don't even think about it. It's difficult, harder even than the morning warm-ups May told her to keep on doing, but it gets easier. Their minds are a series of doors, a different one for each person she meets, and she keeps them locked.

Jean starts bringing in new people, people she can trust to keep their minds focused, for Skye to read. One day it's a woman with brown skin and short white hair, whose mind feels like wind and water. Another day it's a man with a visor across his eyes, who thinks of pink elephants simply to make Jean laugh, looking at her with pure adoration, and whose mind is a sharp focused beam. And one day Jean lets Skye read Logan and it is terrifying. His mind is a dark tangle of places and times and pain and relief that his present is this present, whatever that means. “He's keeping a lot of secrets.” Skye says to Jean afterward. “Don't you want to know?”

“People keep secrets for a reason. I trust Logan.” Jean replies and Skye wonders if she's ever peeked inside Logan's head to see the future that could have happened, the future where Jean's gone, and if that made her pull back out of fear. Skye thinks she understands that, after years of keeping SHIELD's secrets, but some part of her, the part that joined the Rising Tide, still wonders what it would feel like to blow everything wide open.

When she goes back to the team, she can keep her mind to herself and she can cook a meal without moving a finer, yet she's still not sure what her powers are meant for. She tells Trip this, sitting on the couch with him one night and letting herself lean her head on his shoulder. “I just don't know what I'm supposed to do with all of this.” she says, waving a hand and levitating the bowl of popcorn over to them.

“Be on two computers at the same time, beat the bad guys, be a superhero.” Trip says lazily.

“I'm not a superhero.” she laughs.

“I think you are.” he winds his hand through hers, not really thinking about it until she glances down and blinks in surprise. But she doesn't let go and he's pretty sure that's a good thing. “What are you really worried about, Skye?”

“Becoming the big bad.” It's that simple. “Overusing my powers until I can't talk to people without reading their minds.”

“Well, that's not going to happen. Your powers are going to help so many people. You're good.” he says firmly. “You're one of the best people I've ever known.” And he leans down to kiss her, like she's wanted him to for so long, and when he does, her mind goes completely quiet for the first time in months.

“You know, I don't exactly have the greatest track record with guys I've kissed.” she says breathlessly when they pull away.

“Well, I hope your luck's about to change.” he replies and kisses her again.

After her training is done, Skye reads her teammates four times. The first time is by accident, on a rainy January morning, when Jemma bursts in with the remnants of tears on her face and with her mind screaming a name that the team hasn't heard in a long time. That's how she knows that Leo Fitz is back in their lives and she has a feeling that, from the thread of hope that runs underneath Jemma's thoughts, that this might be a good thing. And so she tells Jemma that, pulling her out from beneath her covers, and she thinks that this might be what her powers are for: telling people what they already know.

The second time is in the kitchen of a Northern bed-and-breakfast, watching Leo Fitz work with Jemma Simmons again and feeling a powerful sense of nostalgia. She doesn't mean to but then she's opening the door again (a sleek glass door, like the kind you'd find in a lab) and she's plunged inside Leo Fitz's thoughts and all of them are Jemma. And for once, she wishes that people would want to hear what she reads.

The third time is much later, after Leo and Jemma have found each other again and after Leo Fitz is no longer an idiot, when she's having brunch with Jemma on a weekend off. Jemma's mind is shouting again, before Skye even sees her, and she doesn't have to look at the engagement ring on Jemma's finger to know what's happened. 

The fourth time is the best time. She's curled up beside Trip in his bunk and he turns to her and tells her to read him, with a gentleness in his voice that she thinks she'll never get tired of hearing. And when she does, it is bright and wonderful and her luck amazes her. “I love you too,” she says and she thinks that her life is messy and difficult and complicated and the farthest thing from easy, but that it is good.

**Author's Note:**

> The X-Men timeline used here is that of the movies, as of Days of Future Past. My memory of the earlier films is a little hazy, so hopefully Jean isn't too OOC.


End file.
